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Introducing the ‘Sutton Who’ font

Shortly before Christmas I was trading tweets with Clayton Hickman and Matthew Harris about Sid Sutton’s 1980s Doctor Who logo. I’m one of those wearisome people who’ve made parodies of this in the past, and so have sort of developed a ‘system’ for how to create the highlights, tubing etc. It always takes an age, though. But when Clayton shared the fact Sutton had based his logo on a specific font – Formula One – (I’d always used Vag Rounded) I had a quick look online and realised it existed in TTF format.

From there, I decided to see if I could actually modify Formula One (which, was used in unaltered form during that time for the show’s credits) into a proper font that anyone could then install and fart about with.

A lot of Photoshopping later, and with the kind assistance and patience of Paul Smith (I’m going to link to his website too, and implore you to buy from Wonderful Books, because he’s really been great), who actually converted my graphics into TTFs, it’s done. I think it’s done. Tweet me if there are issues @grahamkw.

The finished font is named – as suggested by Clay – Sutton Who, and comes in three ‘families’.

Sutton Who Top – which gives you all the variants you need to creat the top half of the logo, plus, the letters unconnected by tubing… just because. And the component parts for the logo’s frame.

Sutton Who Bottom – the lower half. Two variants here, because the first letter (what would be the ‘W’ in ‘WHO’) doesn’t have a connecting tube on the left, but then the subsequent letter(s) do(es).

Sutton Who Bottom End – yes, it’s complicated, but the final letter (‘O’ in ‘WHO’) doesn’t have a connecter on the right. So another variant is required. NB. Paul has also included this character set as glyphs within Sutton Who Bottom, but not all versions of Photoshop let you access font glyphs, hence the reason for this third set.

Yes, three font set. It’s a slightly laborious work-around, but these are the elements you need to make your own Sutton-esque creations. As long as you have the ability to wrangle them in an art program.

As I said, there may still be issues with this thing. And I haven’t created a full character set, because that would take forever and here’s hoping there isn’t ever a compelling reason to create a 1980s Doctor Who font parody that includes a percentage sign.